Sunday, February 1, 2009

There's a lot of people talking in 'hot forums' about what is going to happen to the big book industry. I think its like worrying about what will happen to CNN.

Would it be bad if Borders closed? I go in there and look around sometimes. The employees wear headsets and talk to one another through the headsets?

I think tomorrow I will go in and get near the help desk until someone asks me if I need help and I will say yes where is Charles Dickens I have been looking for him all my life and I will be led to the Dickens and I will take all the copies of his books they have and load them into my arms and then I will go back near the help desk and wait to get asked again if I need help and will say yes where is Bret Easton Ellis I have been looking for him all my life and we will go get the books and maybe I will need to begin sticking some of the titles into my waistband or down into my pantlegs like getting fat, on and on in this fashion maybe to Roberto Bolano next and then maybe Darryl Strawberry and whatever that woman who read that dumb-as-slip poem at Obama's thingamabob, and once I've got all those books and I can't carry them any more I will go back to the guy at the desk who by now has accepted with exasperation that I am being a fuck and yet still being a kind employee will put offer his services and through a crack in the book stacks I will ask him where is Barry Hannah and he will lead me through the store again to show me there is absolutely none.

I saw my sister reading Stephanie Meyer, the first book I'd seen her with in a long while, and took and threw it in the trash. There wasn't any applesauce in the trashbag so she just got it back out again.

My mom says I should be glad she is reading again.

Maybe taking Borders away from people would be like taking the razorblades from the genuinely sad preteen with unabashed will to cut and not for show.

Some article the other day was talking about what online magazines are good and labeled Narrative Magazine as 'the gold standard.' I think Narrative Magazine is exactly what I got interested in online publishing to get away from! I think my bing dow is exploder!

Someone should convince Oprah to start a web literary journal. Oprah's Power Camp, I would read that and look at the words too.

I am not early Ian Mackaye. I like a lot of stuff. But the forum feels like politics to me, it could go either way, $$$$$$$$. But it's also amusing to watch people in a tailspin about it. As if language is a stock market. More often, for many, it is TV.

Contrary to popular belief, you CAN change a person's taste.

I wish there were such a thing as non-theoretical fascism by a creative figurehead with compassion.

Everything will continue until it does not.

I've been finding myself saying 'I don't know what that means' a lot lately while speaking to other people.

I'm ready to get disinterested, but I won't.

I have felt kind of out of control inside myself lately in a fully controllable way.

Something is trying to eat my time by becoming inside my time. If it weren't for 'Music for Airports' I might have thrown my laptop into the pool last week while a dog was watching. I like when you are alone with a dog and you do something that a human would react to by speaking and the dog doesn't even really move and they look at you with 3/4ths of their eyes like they are only partially invested but they were like there to see what you did. Sometimes to break the moment they will hear something else passing near them, but something subtle, and they will bark a little around the corners of their mouth like getting ready to bark.

hi david: yes thinking kind of rules, as does in looking at the peeps. hi.

drivingsnow: the one near me has all of his titles that i know of. though it is in midtown atlanta, which might mean it is hipper than others. regardless, the overflux of 2666 i see everywhere is too much in and of itself.

WOW BORDERS SELLS BOOKS? I DIDN'T KNOW THAT I THOUGHT THEY ONLY SOLD DVDS AND BLU-RAYS AND MUSIC DISCS AND COFFEE SHOPS WEIRD HOW THAT WORKS.

Their selection sucks. What the fuck.

David: I agree. I would suck the Borders teat if I was making the big book money.

Here is how you can get your book in Borders!:

1. Do something else (i.e. become President of the United States, climb a very dangerous mountain, survive having cancer and become a better person from it, be on a TV game show about fat people getting not fat)!2. Write a book about it!

Re: "ish there were such a thing as non-theoretical fascism by a creative figurehead with compassion."

Your wish is granted. I give you the Russian Orthodox Church.

The worst thing about Borders is that when I go in to look for a book by James Baldwin he is not shelved in 'Literature' but in 'African-American Interest,' because African Americans are interesting. And Quentin Crisp, I discover, his books are shelved neither in 'Literature' nor in 'Biography' but in 'Queer Studies,' as if we could be studied, especially by anyone at Borders.

Or wait, was it the other way around -- maybe it was Baldwin in with the queers and Quentin with the blacks? Borders got me lost.